By Robert Scucci
| Published
This week, I’m spending some time out of state visiting my parents for some much needed rest and relaxation. While things are mostly going well, I was stuck watching Friends the other night because I lost my remote privileges after queuing up an unhealthy amount of South Park and Nicolas Cage movies. While watching the episode entitled “The One with the Jellyfish,” I actually laughed out loud – which surprised even me because I hate this show more than I can presently articulate – because there’s one sight gag that caught me off guard: on the stage behind Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) at Central Perk, where she performs her folk music about smelly cats or whatever, sits a HiWatt half stack; the most inappropriate piece of equipment for a cafe gig because these things are loud as hell.
There’s No Way Phoebe Needs To Move That Much Air
Though I can’t make out the exact model of the HiWatt amp in this Friends episode, I can assure you that it was deliberately placed in Central Perk as a sight gag for the musically inclined.
I can also confirm that the speaker cabinet packs four 12-inch speakers, and the amplifier’s power rating could range anywhere from 80-120 watts of tube power, depending on how many valves are housed in the unit.
As somebody who has played in bands through my formative years and well into adulthood, I can tell you with the utmost confidence that the HiWatt half stack behind Phoebe in this Friends episode was placed in the background to elicit laughter because it’s absolutely overkill.
For context, I once played bass for a stoner metal band, and both guitarists were playing through similar rigs. As the usual “I need to be the loudest person in the room” complex plays out, which is typical guitarist behavior, I remember redlining my own rig to find my place in the mix.
A general rule of thumb for bass players like myself who play through solid-state rigs suggests that you need at least three times the wattage to keep up with a similarly rated tube-powered amp. During one rehearsal, I had my 500-watt rig cranked so high that we were rattling light fixtures out of the ceiling.
We were so loud that we had to have a band meeting about turning down during rehearsal because we were drowning out the drum kit. What’s more, playing that loud in a basement messes with your hearing so bad that it actually throws off your equilibrium to the point where you’ll walk face-first into a door frame after jamming out if you’re not one to wear hearing protection.
So when I saw Friends suggest that Phoebe uses a HiWatt amp for her Central Perk gigs, I spit my drink out, and ended up having to give the family a dog bath because she got absolutely blasted with Diet Coke.
Friends Has Indie Cred
When I first saw Phoebe’s HiWatt in “The One With the Jellyfish,” I immediately looked up the Friends episode online to see if anybody else noticed it. What I learned through my research is that Friends has some indie cred that I didn’t know about because I haven’t watched the series since it originally aired (maybe I should rewatch and reassess based on this information). From Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) wearing an MC5 t-shirt in “The One With the Lottery,” to Phoebe’s HiWatt, fans of the show have pointed out a multitude of Easter eggs that suggest the cast of Friends are way cooler than the characters they portray, who are all insufferable (fight me).
Could Be An Ulterior Motive, But Probably Just A Gag
Fans have suggested that the HiWatt amp made its way into this Friends episode as a result of a crew member writing it into the production budget so they could take it home after a run of episodes, but I can’t find anything online that confirms or denies this claim.
While I always appreciate this level of petty book-cooking, especially if it’s for free music gear, I’m willing to accept that somebody working on the show simply thought it would be funny to have the half stack on stage as a sight gag because bringing a HiWatt to a cafe evokes the mental image of Phoebe opening up the floor at Central Perk before completely leveling the place, which is something I’d genuinely like to see in the yet-to-be-written “The One with the Mosh Pit.”
